Right to Basic Education; Inclusive Education (Mainstreaming): Report on hearings by SA Human Rights Commission

JOINT MONITORING COMMITTEE ON IMPROVEMENT OF QUALITY OF LIFE AND STATUS OF CHILDREN, YOUTH AND DISABLED PERSONS
2 March 2007
RIGHT TO BASIC EDUCATION; INCLUSIVE EDUCATION (MAINSTREAMING): REPORT ON HEARINGS BY SOUTH AFRICAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Chairperson: Ms W Newhoudt-Druchen (ANC)

Documents handed out:
SAHRC presentation on Public Hearing on the Right to Basic Education
SAHRC presentation on Inclusive Education

SUMMARY
The South African Human Rights Commission reported on its findings from the public hearings it had held on the right to a basic education. The finding was that the right to a basic education was not being delivered and that teachers lay at the heart of many of the problems. SAHRC recommended that the Department of Education should have cut-off dates for the provision of infrastructure and qualified teachers and that monitoring and evaluation systems should be set up. With regard to inclusive education, the SAHRC found that this system was not functioning, and recommended, among other things, that a dual system (inclusive education and special needs education) be used and that the Department consult with the disability sector. There was discussion in particular of children’s direct voices, the gender disparity in the dropout rate and the need for sensitivity training but all of the issues raised in the presentation were discussed.

MINUTES
South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) report on the Public Hearing on the Right to Basic Education, October 2005

Ms Judith Cohen, Parliamentary Officer: South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) reported on, and made recommendations on the findings of the public hearing on the right to basic education, held in October 2005. She made a second presentation focusing specifically on the right of disabled children to basic education. South Africa had made considerable strides in education but her presentation focused on the challenges. The terms of reference took into account the context of the right to basic education, the context within which the right is implemented and the legislative and policy provisions. The hearing was limited to compulsory education.

The framework used focused on four As:
• Availability (legislative provisions, physical infrastructure, provisioning of teachers; supply of teaching materials and aids)
• Accessibility (non discriminatory physical and economic access)
• Acceptability (the form and substance of education including curricula and teaching methods; for example, the prohibition of corporal punishment; responding to teenage pregnancy; respect for religious convictions; language of instruction, safety)
• Adaptability (the flexibility needed to respond to the ever-changing needs of our society such as child-headed households, migrants, the disabled).

The finding was that quality education is not taking place in South Africa. The lived daily reality at school for many children is incongruous with the legislation and the policies of the Department. Poverty and dysfunctionality reinforces exclusion within education. Education is unaffordable due to school fees and other hidden costs. Many learners are hungry at school. The drop-out rate of learners is concerning. There is too much violence and abuse in our schools, including sexual abuse, gangsterism and drugs, vandalism and corporal punishment. Basic resources such as buildings, sanitation, water, electricity and telephones are lacking in some schools. Teachers lie at the heart of many of the challenges. They lack passion and a culture of learning and teaching, are not in the classroom enough, are unqualified and under qualified, untrained to implement the new curriculum; use old teaching methods; have too many children in their classes and are disconnected from the community in which they teach.

The SAHRC recommended that:
• Mother-tongue language is needed as a medium of instruction.
• Fee-free schools must be introduced rapidly.
• The school dropout rate needs to be comprehensively understood and addressed.
• The state should be more active in ensuring compulsory school attendance.  Access to quality education should not be dependent on race, social class or geographic location.
• Poor learners who live far from their nearest school should receive comprehensive state transport assistance in order to access education.
• Alternatives to the current models of School Governing Bodies (SGBs) must be explored and amendments made to the South African Schools Act (SASA) if necessary. Many schools do not have adequately functioning school governing bodies. Democratic participation by communities in education is necessary in order to ensure that the social context is appreciated and given the necessary space to influence the fulfillment of the right to basic education.
• Districts need to be prioritised as the service delivery vehicle of education. District offices are not viewed as being supportive.
• The impact of HIV/AIDS on education must be directly addressed within schools. The education system needs to be more responsive to the challenges of children who are infected and affected by HIV/AIDS
• Violence and abuse findings relate to accessibility and acceptability. There must be dialogue between role-players and support of alternatives to corporal punishment.
• Inclusivity was dealt with more comprehensively in a separate presentation (see below).
• Poorer provinces spend less on education less than wealthier provinces. There should be equitable provisioning between provinces.
• Minimum level of infrastructure provisioning, including libraries, should be determined and implemented. A cut-off date must be set for this.
• There should also be a deadline for under or unqualified teachers. Teacher morale should be addressed by all parties.
• Adequate and reliable support for monitoring and evaluation systems, to inform the Department accurately about what is happening in schools and whether quality educating is being delivered, do not exist and should be implemented.

Inclusive Education (Mainstreaming)
The SAHRC found that inclusive education is not working. There is a lack of access to education facilities for some learners with disabilities; anomalies in the spread of LSEN (Learners with Special Education Needs) schools through provinces; physical barriers, teacher incompetence and under-confidence. The 2001 White Paper on Inclusive Education supported mainstreaming but the disability sector informed the Commission that schools do not accommodate children with disabilities. Blind SA reported that provincial departments of education are uncertain on how to implement the policy; the curriculum for blind learners is inadequate in that it does not address blind learners’ specific learning needs such as Braille skills, social skills and mobility training. There are insufficient options being provided to parents. Rural learners who are blind are not accommodated in the education system. There are no comprehensive statistics on the number of blind and partially sighted learners upon which to monitor and evaluate the provision of education. There is a lack of consultation with the blind community on how to approach and deal with many of these issues. More research is needed. DeafSA said that the medical approach used to educate deaf learners in South Africa focuses on speech training. This results in many deaf persons being functionally illiterate. The Department fails to consult and engage sufficiently with the deaf community. Deaf people are not provided with sufficient opportunities to speak for themselves. Instead they are too often reliant on others who interpret on their behalf. FEDSAS (Federation of Associations of Governing Bodies of South African Schools) said that the White Paper is being interpreted and applied differently throughout the country and that educators do not always have the necessary knowledge to teach children with disabilities effectively. This results in social exclusion rather than inclusion of learners with disabilities within the classroom.

The SAHRC recommended that
• The Department must consult regularly with the disability sector.
• The Department needs to consult, monitor and research in order to determine those places where the inclusive education is failing children. Where learners are completely excluded from the system, creative measures must be implemented with immediate effect

The Department of Education had undertaken to engage with all of these recommendations.

Discussion

Mr A Madella (ANC) asked whether children’s own voices had been heard in the public hearings. He was of the opinion that education should be compulsory up to the age of eighteen. He agreed that many males dropped out of school because of antisocial activities such as gangsterism, especially in the Western Cape. He wondered whether the provincial education departments still employed truancy officers.

Mainstreaming learners with disabilities without providing infrastructure and other assistance for them in schools is a problem. Special schools’ finance had been cut because all of these learners were expected to attend mainstream schools but no provision had been made for learners with special needs in mainstream schools. Transport and many other factors could be a barrier to mainstreaming.  At the Eros School in Cape Town, 2006 was the last year the school could offer Grade 12. The future for the Eros learners would be a disability grant at the end of Grade 11. Disability-sensitivity training would also be needed if disabled learners were to attend mainstream schools because children could be ‘unintentionally cruel’.

Ms E Ngaleka (ANC) saw the higher enrolment rate of girls as a positive sign; why did the SAHRC view it negatively? Who were defined as role players and invited to hearings? The SAHRC had reported that SGBs worked in former Model C schools only; would it not be better to educate parents more, rather than abandon the system?

Mr M Moss (ANC) asked whether any parents had been prosecuted for denying their children the right to education. SGBs had much power and should ensure that communities were involved in addressing the challenges facing education. The section 29 right to education in the Constitution includes mass and Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET); much remained to be done in that area.

Mr D Gamede (ANC) wanted to know where public hearings were held.

Ms H Weber (DA) emphasised that SGBs needed training. One SGB had dismissed a teacher without ensuring compliance with the legal conditions for dismissal. The teacher had appealed to the Council for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) and the SGB had had goods taken by the sheriff.

Deaf and blind learners needed Early Childhood Development (ECD) more than other learners.

The public needed to be sensitised to the disability.

Was there any data on attendance at schools with successful feeding schemes?

The Chair asked for clarity on the high drop-out rate between Grades One and Three (26%). Could the higher drop-out rate for boys be because most primary school teachers were women and male role models in school were lacking?

SAHRC Commissioner, Mr Tom Manthatha, said that it was difficult to hear children at public hearings because ‘kids don’t talk to their parents’ so the children’s voices referred to were ‘academic, not real’. In general, he ascribed a large part of the challenges facing education to the under development of communities: if schools became a community asset, much progress would be made.

Ms Cohen added that it was essential to hear children’s voices in evaluating the delivery of children’s rights. Learners had testified and much research that was based on in-depth work with children had been referred to in drawing up the report. Role players included national and provincial government, non-government organsiations, parents, learners, unions, academics, SGB federations, school associations and others. The terms of reference were first published in the Government Gazette and then distributed as widely as possible. The public hearings on the child’s right to education had taken place in Johannesburg, the hearings into school-based violence had taken place in the Western Cape and the hearings on conditions on farms had taken place at many venues. The SAHRC was limited by staff constraints.

The issue of school dropouts was very controversial and ‘everyone wants to talk about it’. Academics and the Department of Education staff had been unable to agree on terminology. The Net Enrolment Rate (NER) was 97% of all children of school-going age so the number, if not the proportion, of dropouts was high. Very little was known about this group but some speculated that they were the disabled.

Ms Cohen was also pleased that more girls than boys were attending school but the findings should be interrogated to find out if boys were dropping out to be antisocial. The high dropout rate in Grades One to Three was due to learners registering, dropping out and re-registering but it stabilised from Grade Three to Grade 10, when it increased again. She agreed with Mr Moss that education should not be limited by gender or age. In answer to Ms Weber’s question, school-feeding schemes did not always run well. Children arrived at school hungry, with their parents believing that they would receive a meal at school and often this did not happen. The Department would first have to get the system running better before impact could be investigated.

Sensitivity training was of the utmost importance. South Africans should have the morals and values that led them to treat all others with respect. Children lacked male role models particularly, which was one of he causes of male violence.

Mr Gamede said that populations of the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal were most important because a ten-kilometre walk to school was common and that the public hearings should have been held there. Also, corporal punishment had been abolished but schools gave learners detention, which was mental, not physical, torture. And had the education playing fields been levelled if untrained teachers and infrastructure backlogs existed in the poorer areas only? He said that school principals forced learners to drop from the higher grade to the standard grade to improve the pass rate. He asked if it was really practical to set a deadline for the provision of minimum infrastructure.

Mr L Nzimande (ANC) went to a special school (for blind learners) and doubted whether that system was the best as “kids died there”. They never had Braille books and used older books than mainstream schools. He and his peers had tried to kill a boarding master because they learned violence at school. It was very important to hear learners. The environment was not conducive to education, learners dropped out of school because of lack of support. Was the office to advocate support of disabled children being established and what had become of Section 5 committees?

The Chair agreed that the education of deaf learners was as appalling as that of blind learners. She said that she was not welcome at deaf schools because she investigated abuse.

Ms Ngaleka asked if low teacher morale could be attributed to the impact of HIV AIDS on them.

The Chair asked if there was research on the number of remedial teachers in schools; was there one-to-one support for ADHD and dyslexic learners in mainstream classes? She commented that non-payment of fees lead to psychological abuse because teachers told learners that they must be stupid if their parents could not pay fees. She wanted to know if teacher training encompassed sensitivity training. She was aware of a lack of funding at one school. How did the Department respond? She had lived in Washington where the schools had security fences and metal detectors – was that practice researched? Would truancy officers be re-introduced? The communities needed to examine that issue.

Ms Cohen responded that teachers felt that the prohibition of corporal punishment left a vacuum. There was training and a booklet but teachers found it difficult to change, especially because parents used corporal punishment. It was an emotional issue, like abortion and the death penalty.

The playing fields were not level; just as there were two economies, there were two education systems. There should be targets for infrastructure provision but it was difficult to prioritise – a vandalised school or a community with no school? The deaf community had spoken the most about social ills and abuse at special schools. There should be both mainstreaming and special schools, not either/or. Parents should have a choice, depending on the child’s ability.

The SAHRC had held hearings on school-based violence and would release its findings before the end of the year. The lack of school psychologists had emerged there.

The impact of HIV on teacher morale had been examined by the Human Sciences Research Council who had released a report on the topic. HIV/AIDS was one of the many factors contributing to low teacher morale. She recommended this report and Emerging Voices, on rural education, released by the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Regarding the issue of an office for disabled children, she said that the SAHRC would have senior co-ordinators for children and the disabled, older people, people with HIV and refugees. It had been found that one person for children and the disabled had been too much of a workload. Section 5 committees had gone out of favour but one remained for parliamentary meetings.

Mr Manthatha said that the educational environment issue was most important. So was discipline. Some communities blamed human rights education for lack of discipline in learners. WE should guide one another and put our heads together. He agreed that there should have been hearings in Limpopo and other provinves but the SAHRC was understaffed.

Mr Madella said that it was good that the Department of Education had responded to the recommendations. Would the SAHRC revert back to the Department after a period?

Ms Cohen answered that the SAHRC was still scrutinising the Department’s responses to the recommendations and would follow up. She thanked the Committee for their time and said that she had heard two key issues – disability and the drop-out rate.

Mr Moss said that west coast schools had been integrated three years previously but coloured learners preferred to remain at the larger formerly coloured school instead of going to the formerly white school. Did those dynamics exist in other communities?

Mr Manthatha agreed and said that black learners also went to formerly white schools and found language and cultural barriers there too.

All the members of the Committee expressed their gratitude for the presentations and the meeting was adjourned.